Welcome to the Monthly Mash, a mashup of tools, tales and tips on customer service and the customer experience from around the blogosphere.

Volume 15: January 2013

Customer Experience Resource: Social Monitoring Tools

In our guest post last week, Who Won the Great Social Customer Service Race? we saw how major brands like Coca-Cola and Bank of America responded to customer engagement on Twitter. The experiment, while showing how different companies reacted to social interaction, also demonstrated how important it is for companies of all size to be monitoring their social media channels.

Social monitoring tools are not hard to find. It seems like a new competitor jumps into the space every week. Social monitoring ranges from free personal tools like Hootsuite (which does have a paid version) to premium services like Radian6 used by large companies like the Ultimate Fighting Championship.

What can social monitoring do for you and your organization?

Do you want to know when your customers are talking abut you and what they are saying? Do you want the ability to respond quickly to customer service issues? Do you want the ability to interact with potential customers before they turn to a competitor?

If you answered yes to any of these questions, then you have to have a conversation with customers and potential customers. To have that conversation, you have to hear who is trying to speak with you.

Of course, the challenge today is that your customers are speaking to you via multiple channels. Is it a phone call? An angry tweet? A laudable Facebook post? A satiric YouTube video? Social monitoring tools allow you to keep track of these conversations and to respond to them.

Someone Was Listening:

Sometimes the most popular post from the previous month; sometimes just the one I liked best.

We were very excited to introduce the concept of Hero-ClassTM Customer Service this past month. In What is Hero-Class Customer Service? Part 1 and What is Hero-Class Customer Service? Part 2, we introduced a specific way of viewing organizations who consistently deliver exceptional customer service and an amazing customer experience. We drew strengths from the Superheroes we all know know to help us define the traits that a Customer Service Hero has.

Hello Adam,
How are you today? Great sharing of awesome tools. You share about the hootsuite and I am using it for sharing the stuff. These tools help us in monitoring the activities. I think hootsuite is best as compared to other alternatives. What do you think Adam. Do reply.
Thanks for sharing 🙂